Many providers of digital content desire to deliver their content, which includes video, audio, etc., “on demand” to any requester, at any time. In particular, these providers are striving to enable viewers to access the entirety of their television programming free from a broadcast schedule. Typical television programming includes new-release movies, and all broadcast and premium television programs originating from various television networks. “Everything On Demand” (“EOD”) and “Network Personal Video Recorder” (“nPVR”) are terms coined to describe this type of on-demand service.
Presently, conventional video services technology, referred to as Video On Demand (“VOD”), is available to provide a limited amount of video in a time-shifted fashion. But there are drawbacks in using this technology to support EOD. For example, consider that viewers currently receive most of their content from broadcasted sources, and as such, the resources for providing VOD are primarily designed to deliver video to only a limited number of subscribers at one time. VOD resources, such as VOD servers and VOD distribution equipment, are not designed to provide most of a viewer's content in accordance with EOD. Thus, it would be prohibitively expensive to deploy sufficient VOD resources to provide a dedicated on-demand stream for each requester on a full-time basis.
Equipment needed for VOD and EOD service falls into one of three segments: servers, transport, and distribution. Servers store and playout video programs, while transport equipment propagates the video files and real-time streams between distribution sites and hubs, typically over optical fiber. Distribution equipment generally routes, switches, multiplexes, transrates, transcodes, scrambles, modulates and upconverts the video streams for final delivery to the home. Typically, distribution products are placed in cable headends, cable hubs, telephone company central offices, and other distribution centers.
A drawback to traditional VOD distribution equipment is that it lacks the capability to transrate, splice, route, and transcode video streams. Conventional VOD resources are also bandwidth inefficient and have inflexible switching capabilities. Further, many processes such as transrating, encoding, decoding, transcoding, and scrambling are usually implemented using hardware or software processes that are reliant on the continuity of the input streams, and thus, do not include the scheduling and state management resources necessary for a time-multiplexed, multiple-stream application. Instead, each stream processor must be implemented with sufficient resources to meet worst-case demands, and any multi-stream capabilities are achieved by replicating the entire stream processing sub-system. For this and other reasons, distribution as well as other resources are traditionally expensive and consume physical space in the distribution center unnecessarily.
In view of the foregoing, it would be highly desirable to overcome the drawbacks associated with the aforementioned techniques and structures for delivering content. It is also desirable to provide techniques and apparatus for reducing the cost and densities of distribution equipment when used to process a large number of video, audio, and data streams, and to deliver any video program in an on-demand, point-to-point, and unicast fashion.